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Akarli, Engin

Engin Akarli

Joukowsky Family Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Modern Middle Eastern History

Overview

Akarli studied economics at Robert College (BA '68), southeast European history at University of Wisconsin (MA '72), and Middle East history at Princeton (MA '73, Ph.D. '76). He taught at Bosphorus University in Istanbul (1976-83), Yarmouk University in Jordan (1983-89), and Washington University in St. Louis (1989-96) before joining Brown. He held research fellowships at Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (1985-86), at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton (2003-04), and at the Islamic Legal Studies Program of Harvard Law School (2005-06). He taught courses in economic history of the world and the Middle East and wrote on Ottoman demographic, fiscal and political history earlier in his career. His later works explore the history of geographical Syria under Ottoman rule. His book on Ottoman Lebanon in 1860-1920 won the Best History Book Prize of the Missouri Historical Society. Currently, he works on themes related to the legal history of the region.

Brown Affiliations

Research Areas

Research

Research Overview

Akarli's research project, "Law in the Marketplace: Istanbul Artisans, 1730-1840," examines how the Ottoman legal system worked and where it failed in dealing with conflicts affecting urban market relations in a relatively long and critical period of Ottoman history. The project also links the tensions of the Ottoman legal system to its gradual transformation in the nineteenth century and discusses the implications of this transformation for state-society relations in the modern Middle East.

Research Statement

Engin Deniz Akarli's book project, Law in the Marketplace: Istanbul Artisans, 1730-1840, examines how the Ottoman legal system worked and where it failed in dealing with conflicts affecting urban market relations in a relatively long and critical period of Ottoman history. The project also links the tensions of the Ottoman legal system to its gradual transformation in the nineteenth century and discusses the implications of this transformation for state-society relations in the modern Middle East. The originality and significance of the project are in the sources on which it relies and in its focus on a combination of understudied themes.

Law has been a long-neglected theme in modern historiography of non-Western contexts, partly because habits of thought shaped by modern concepts of law and state used to make it difficult to recognize, let alone appreciate, differently conceived legal cultures and systems. Recent debates on law, however, challenge established perceptions and encourage efforts to expand the scope of human experience on which to base our understanding of law and its place in human life. Simultaneously, recent research on Islamic legal thought (which informed Ottoman legal practice) points to its sophistication and significance as one of the major legal traditions of human history.

Studies on Islamic legal history, however, rely primarily on sources of a theoretical nature. We still know little about how Islamic legal tradition informed the judiciary processes and reasoning in specific historical settings or about its perceptions by the people who relied on it to defend their interests. One of my main objectives is to address these gaps relying on the most detailed sources available to us, namely the judiciary documents preserved in the Ottoman archives.

Sources
The Ottoman kadi court records and the judicial files of the Ottoman Imperial Council (Divan) constitute by far the richest sources available to researchers interested in legal praxis in an Islamic context before the advent of the modern state and legal systems. There is a growing interest in using the regular court records as a source of legal history, in conjunction with contemporaneous collections of legal opinions (fatawa) and legal treatises. However, the formulaic nature of the court records impedes in-depth inquiries into judiciary processes and reasoning. The judicial files of the Divan, on the other hand, provide detailed information on the background of each case as well as on the legal evidence pertaining to it. Only a few scholars mostly interested in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century legal history have used these files so far, although the most detailed files date from the period covered in my research. I rely primarily on the Divan files (but also use some relevant court records and legal treatises) to shed light on the legal contexts and practices through which the meaning of law and justice was negotiated and interpreted in the Ottoman capital.

Scope of the Work
The sheer volume of the Divan's judicial files necessitates the limitation of the scope of research. I focus on the artisans and traders of the major business-districts of greater Istanbul in 1730-1840. Artisans and traders were religiously and ethnically mixed town-dwellers. They had differences among themselves as well as with merchants, owners of work premises, vendors, and various government offices and officials. They turned to the legal system to defend their interests and became involved in demonstrations calling for justice when they believed the legal system had failed them.

The period I cover begins with a major popular uprising in which Istanbul artisans and traders were actively involved. It ends with a turning point in Ottoman history, when the adoption of a bureaucratic and legal reorganization policy began to transform the Ottoman state and society after Western models. In between, we have a period of relative tranquility and prosperity until about 1775, then a phase of wars and economic hardship. Observing the performance of the Ottoman legal system through the vicissitudes of this period with a focus on artisans and traders enables me to examine how it worked or failed to work through a broad range of conflictive situations that affected the marketplace and the various social groups that made up its human tapestry.

Outline of the Work

Part I: The Legal System and the Due Legal Process: Part One describes the organization of the Ottoman legal system and the procedures with which it worked. My main argument is that at all levels of the legal process, the Ottoman legal culture emphasized the reconciliation of real or potential differences through negotiations in light of certain broad legal principles and norms embedded in Islamic legal tradition and held to be universally relevant. Through this process, the courts made and remade the laws, in the practical sense of the word as binding provisions, with the participation of those actors to whom the provisions would apply.

Part II: Property Relations: In Part Two, I illustrate the operation of the system in detail by focusing on the legal regulation of property relations over immovable urban commercial property, an issue particularly sensitive to social and economic changes in general. I show how the complexity of these relations eventually strained the courts' capacity to reconcile differences and to accommodate change.

Part III: Fundamental Objectives of the Law and Non-Muslim Artisans: In Part Three, I focus on tensions and cooperation among artisans and traders of the same calling but of different religious affiliation and on the courts handling of these differences. My aim is to examine how certain universalistic norms or claims of the Ottoman-Islamic legal tradition worked in practice. I observe that the Ottoman legal tradition served quite effectively in a complex multi-religious environment but not as equitably as the emerging modern ideals of law and citizenship promised.

Part IV: Changes in the Reform Era and Conclusions: In this final part, I will examine the changes in legal institutions and the concept of law in the nineteenth century and the repercussions of these changes for state-society relations in the post-Ottoman Middle East. At this point, I hold that reforms may have produced seemingly strong and stable states and, in certain cases, rule of law in the modern Middle East but not regimes that are consistently accountable to the people over which they rule. This is a legacy of the nineteenth century, rather than the eighteenth. Law had different meanings and objectives that were more responsive to the society and provided a greater degree of civic autonomy and initiative in the eighteenth century. That system cannot be resurrected and would not fit our world. Learning about the experience of the people who used and influenced it, however, may inspire reassessments of the current relations between state, society and law in the Middle East. At the least, it should broaden the comparative and historical base of our understanding of the place of law in human life.

Funded Research

For current research:
National Endowment for the Humanities at Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton ($35,000)
Islamic Legal Studies Program at Harvard Law School ($22,950)
Brown University (sabbatical leaves and research account)

Scholarly Work

• "Law in the Marketplace, 1730-1840." In Dispensing Justice in Islam: Qadis and their Judgments, ed. by M. Khalid Masud, Rudolph Peters and David S. Powers (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2006), pp. 245-270.

• "The Subordination of the Hawran Druze in 1910: The Ottoman Perspective." In The Druze: Realities and Perceptions, ed. by Kamal Salibi (London: The Druze heritage Foundation, 2005), pp. 115-128 (with Abdul-Rahim Abu-Husayn).

• "Gedik: A Bundle of Rights and Obligations for Istanbul Artisans and Traders, 1750-1840." In Law, Anthropology and the Constitution of the Social: Making Persons and Things, ed. by Alain Pottage and Martha Mundy (Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 166-200.

• "The Tangled Ends of an Empire and Its Sultan." In Modernity and Culture from the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean, ed. by Leila Fawaz and Christopher Bailey (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), pp. 261-284.

• Ottoman Documents on Jordan: Part 1: "The Ottoman Government and Semi-Nomadic Tribes in Northern Jordan, 1846-1851" [in Arabic], and Part 2: "Ottoman Criteria for the Choice of an Administrative Center, 1909-1910" [in English] (Amman: Publication of the University of Jordan, 1989).

• "The State as a Socio-Cultural Phenomenon in Turkey." In Political Participation in Turkey: Historical Background and Present Problems, ed. by E. D. Akarli (with Gabriel Ben-Dor) (Istanbul: Bosphorus University Press, 1975).

Background

Education and Training

Honors and Awards

 2005-06: Islamic Legal Studies Fellowship at Harvard Law School.
 2003-04: National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow at the School of Historical Studies, Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.
 Invited to the American University of Beirut by the Provost and the Department of History and Archeology as the biannual guest speaker at the said department, May 22-June 3, 2002.
 January 2002: "directeur d'études associé" at École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris.
 Honorary MA, Brown University, May 1997.
 1993: Missouri Historical Society Best History Book Award
 1973-74: Princeton University and American Research Institute in Turkey (ARIT) Research Grants
 1970-73 & 1974-75: Princeton University Fellowship for Graduate Studies

Affiliations

American Historical Association
Middle East Studies Association of North America
American Research Institute in Turkey
Turkish Studies Association of North America
Syrian Studies Association of North America
Center for Turkish Studies of the Foundation for Science and Arts
Foundation of Social and Economic History of Turkey

Teaching

Teaching Overview

TEACHING

Survey courses:

 HI 144: Islamic History, 1400-1800
A survey of the major sociopolitical alignments of the central parts of the Old World in 1400-1800. Three such alignments, namely the Ottoman, Safavi and Mughal empires spanned much of these central lands in ca. 1500-1750. This course concentrates on the socioeconomic and cultural environment within which the main institutions of these empires developed.

 HI 145: History of the Modern Middle East, 1800-1918
Transformation of Middle Eastern societies along with their involvement in the processes of integration into the modern world order that emerged in the 19th century under Western European domination.

 HI 146: History of the Modern Middle East since 1918
A comparative survey of independence movements and the efforts to establish modern nation-states and societies in the Middle East since 1918. Four interrelated issues are emphasized: Problems of political organization and institutionalization; construction of national ideologies (& identities); management and development of economic resources; and the international setting as it affects the region.

Seminars:
 HI 197/56: "Islamic Legal History: Theory and Practice."
This course examines the historical development of a religiously inspired legal tradition that guided individuals, social relations, commercial transactions, and concepts of political legitimacy in Islamic lands. It emphasizes family law, criminal and property relations relying on theoretical accounts as well as court cases in English translation. The course concludes with a discussion of the challenges that the Islamic legal tradition faced and the changes it underwent in the modern era.

 HI 197 /80: "Dissolution of the Ottoman Empire." This is a historiography seminar where the students study different schools of historical interpretation as they have been applied to the last century of Ottoman history. Students write a research paper based on the critical assessment of the sources (usually travel accounts) available to them in the light of the approaches they have studied in the course

 HI 198/39: "Identity Conflicts in Middle East History since 1900."
This seminar examines the transformation of the Middle East from an ethnically, religiously and culturally cosmopolitan region into a hotbed of ethnic, religious and cultural conflicts and identity crises relying on novels and memoirs as sources.

Reading courses:
 For senior honor's thesis or capstone project writers in History, Middle East Studies, and International Relations, and
 For graduate students interested in Ottoman, Middle East, or Turkish history